


String Theory

by ElDiablito_SF



Category: Black Sails
Genre: Alternate Universe - Reincarnation, And Buddhism, Let's pretend we understand Quantum Physics, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-28
Updated: 2016-09-28
Packaged: 2018-08-18 07:29:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,784
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8153947
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ElDiablito_SF/pseuds/ElDiablito_SF
Summary: James Flint is a physics professor who has spent his life chasing wrinkles in time.  John Silver is having a hard time finishing his latest novel.  The Universe should do something about them.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Dee218](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dee218/gifts).



> This exists because Sus is a sucker for a Reincarnation AU, and I'm a sucker for her face.
> 
> Disclaimer: I know more about Buddhism than quantum physics, which isn't saying much. I was on an airplane and/or jet-lagged while I wrote this. I beg your indulgence ;)

_You were born out of the ether of my dreams. And then the ether took you._

Standing in the middle of Times Square, James Flint has never felt more alone than in the faceless crowds, pressing so close that you could practically hear the atoms colliding just beneath the surface. As always, he stands apart and watches the faces of the passersby, like a captain watches the waves for the smallest change in weather. As always, he doesn’t know whom it is he’s looking for.

***

There must have been a point in time when John could have changed it. When he could’ve said ‘no’. When he _had_ said ‘no’ but he should’ve said ‘yes.’

 _Yes!_ he says, too late. _Yes!_ he shouts into the merciless wind. _Come back to me._

But the moment is gone, and with it the man - carried off by the tides and winds, whither no one knows, though they will go on telling stories about him until they’re all cold and dead, until the fish have claimed them all, bone by bone, ashes to ashes.

“Come with me!” James had said, desperation clouding his voice just as the ache of it clouded John’s mind.

“No,” John had replied. “You go, and I will protect you.”

“I do not want this for you,” James had said. “I never did.”

“Go,” John had repeated. “Be happy. And when I’m done here, I will find you.”

 _In this life or the next, I will find you!_ he thinks.

He still hopes. He still believes that the ocean of his destiny, that suffering which the Buddhists call _dukkha_ , that cycle of life which they call _samsara_ will carry them together again.

John Silver was never a religious man – but this one thing he believes.

***

“I also humbly ask the Powers of the Light to cleanse and protect my entire soul group, especially in the transitional periods of before birth or after death,” James prays.

His colleagues in the Department of Physics would laugh if they knew what new-agey, hippy-dippy ideas had led him to become one of their throng. Still, one doesn’t purport to study quantum physics without at least acknowledging what led you there in the first place: a belief that time was malleable, that time was not a straight line. It was only a question of finding the right formula that would help you figure out when those folds in time take place, how they move, where they might intersect.

Two lines, asymptotically approaching each other, yet never touching. He had fought so hard and lost so many relationships because he could never explain this simple thing to his lovers, his partners, his friends. How somewhere, beyond the veil, if he could only reach out through a wrinkle in time, he would be able to touch his other half.

His other half. He was born out of the ether of his dreams, James understands this. But James would know him if he were to see him, as surely as he recognizes his own face each day in the mirror.

They say he’s eccentric. Well, much worse could be said of a professor of physics. But what’s so eccentric about believing in the multiverse hypothesis? Surely, if it’s good enough for Stephen Hawking, it’s good enough for James Flint. And if the parallel worlds do exist, then surely it is only a matter of finding a way to reach into one of them, and pull out the missing part of him that keeps slipping away.

And if not in this life, then surely in the next. He must not give up. He must keep trying.

***

John can’t remember ever having his heart broken. Then how is he so good at spewing forth stanza after stanza of the kind of poetry even he himself considers emo at best and maudlin at worst? He can’t recall the last time he’d written anything remotely commercial, not to mention produced the thing that has been paying his bills for the past three years: a best seller.

At worst, his prose had been panned by his few critics as overly fanciful, but never so overwrought, never _this_. The poems, if you could even call them that, they have come unbidden, rising with the first light of dawn, tearing him from the clutches of sleep in a cold sweat. His dreams haunt him, and when he’s awake, so do the words.

_You were born out of the ether of my dreams. And then the ether took you._

John doesn’t know what they mean, he only knows that to speak them burns his tongue like the sting of nettles. And the dreams themselves slip through his fingers like sand in the hourglass. Wisps of auburn blowing in a warm breeze, a smattering of freckles across a pale shoulder, and a voice that caresses his ear one moment, then tears his heart apart the next.

“I will find you!” John screams as he awakens, only to encounter an impenetrable blackness where moments before he could have sworn he had been clutching a living, breathing image to his breast.

He has drunk so much black coffee that he suspects it’s going to burn through his stomach lining. He’s not exactly twenty years old anymore: such acts have consequences in the corporeal world, as his reflux doesn’t delay to remind him, and he lights up another cigarette.

He’s always been a good storyteller: so everyone from his adoptive parents to his schoolteachers had always told him. He could spin a yarn like no other, with twists and turns that left the audiences’ heads dizzied and clamoring for more. Yet, somehow, finishing the last novel in his seafaring trilogy had proven a Sisyphean task. The more clear-headed he becomes as the nicotine trickles into his system, the more he suspects he’s written himself into a corner.

For the span of two prior novels now, his main protagonists – the Captain and the Quartermaster of a pirate vessel he’d conjured from somewhere between sleep and wakefulness – had played an elaborate game of cat and mouse with double and triple crosses that required even him to draft outlines (an activity he had scoffed at in his college years). His latest – and last in the series – novel had promised to resolve their complicated entanglements once and for all. But how? He could barely even admit it to himself, and he would never admit so to his agent, Max, his dark secret: he has no idea what his endgame is supposed to be.

Max is going to kill him.

John sighs and closes his eyes, letting his fingers do the walking over the flat, black keys of his MacBook. And when he opens them again, what he sees staring back from the page on the screen is of no help whatsoever.

***

James hardly ever reads _The New Yorker_ , so he doesn’t know what makes him pick up that particular copy on that particular day, but pick it up he does. He’d had another strange night. He had dreamed he was an old man. Or at least he _thinks_ he was an old man. He was waiting for someone to return from a long voyage. A fisherman, perhaps? A sailor? There had been a beach with a half-rusted anchor washed ashore, no doubt from a nearby wreck. He walked through a town he recognized well, though he knew for a fact he had never been there before.

It had an unnerving effect on him.

This endless waiting, like something scratching at the inside of his brain, a dozen feral cats that are trying to break through to the other side. And for what?

To make things somehow yet worse, his grant is due at the end of the week. He’s lucky he has tenure, although he’s still not sure how he got it. He figured he’d only be able to rest upon the laurels of his early accomplishments for so long, but no – academia is a funny place that way. He should have pursued applied physics instead of theoretical physics. How many more times is the government likely to sponsor the search for aberrations in the space-time continuum?

He flips the pages of _The New Yorker_ lazily, as he mentally outlines the specific aims of his proposal and tries to think up more clever euphemisms for “time-travel.” Perhaps he can just let one of his postdocs write it, except he knows deep in his bones this isn’t as personal for any of them, not the way it is for him.

Then, something catches his eyes, his finger stops mid-flip, his breath halts, and he feels as if the floor had fallen out from beneath his feet. His stomach leaps like a wild hare into his throat and then proceeds to tie itself into a Gordian knot.

 _You were born out of the ether of my dreams._  
_And then the ether took you._  
_Between your hands is a crucible that melds and molds me,_  
_And your mouth is an omphalos that forever draws me._  
_If I hold you too tightly, you would turn into water,_  
_And I would never see you again. Not in this lifetime._

James swallows and blinks and reads over the words again. How is it possible that they be here, upon this page, as if arisen from his most intimate of nightmares? He looks at the name of the audacious poet and thinks he recognizes it.

_John Silver_

That sounds vaguely familiar. He may have glimpsed it at the airport book stands, right in between Dan Brown and Stephanie Meyer. He assumes it’s a _nom de plume_ like any other, both the “John” and the “Silver” being commonplace enough. It tells him nothing, in itself, yet somehow – everything.

“What do you know about John Silver?” he asks Hal over lunch, and his friend shrugs and unwraps the same thing James has watched him eat for the past ten years that they’ve shared the table at the cafeteria – a ham and cheese sandwich with a pickle on the side. Hal doesn’t do spontaneity.

“Isn’t that the name of a pirate?”

“No, that’s Long John Silver.”

“Isn’t that what you just said?”

Hal blinks at James across the table and James blinks back.

“No, I’m not talking about some fictional character,” James tries again, questioning his own words even as they fall from his lips. Isn’t he? “John Silver, he’s a… writer or something?”

“Does he write about string theory?” Hal asks, taking a bite out of his pickle.

“I… don’t know. I was only wondering if you’ve heard of him.”

“You want me to Google him for you?”

“Smart ass!”

***

John dreams of sun-warmed skin against his lips. His tongue mapping out a secret path of freckles hidden beneath the soft tufts of auburn hair that tickles his nose as he presses it into a breastbone. His teeth bite at the firm flesh beneath his lips, his hands clutch at the ribcage that expands with labored breaths beneath his weight. The scent and taste of him – his dream lover – is both intoxicating and unbearable. John wants to devour him.

“You were never going to stay,” his dream lover says.

“I’m going to stay this time, you’ll see,” he replies and digs his fingers into the pliant flesh, only to find it slipping away underneath him, the way a sugarcube disappears into a cup of scalding tea.

_Two lines, asymptotically approaching each other, yet never touching._

He doesn’t know where this thought comes from. He’s not even entirely sure he knows what it means.

The upbeat sounds of Britney Spears’ “Toxic” wake him up and he realizes the noise is coming from his phone. His sister Madi had changed his ringtone once upon a blue moon, no doubt thinking it a hilarious joke, and he’s never bothered changing it back. Plus, he likes being reminded of Madi, especially with all the fly-over states separating them these days.

The dream disappears before John can curse his phone, his sister, and Britney Spears’ entire oeuvre, and then he’s grunting what he hopes passes for a greeting into the tiny microphone.

“Who the fuck is James Flint?”

“Good morning to you too, Max.”

“Morning? It’s well past fucking noon. Did you tie one on last night again?”

“I do what I must for my art,” he protests. “The Muses must be propitiated.”

“Well do something about this physics professor!”

John rubs the bridge of his nose, as if by loosening the mucus there he might be able to cajole his brain into higher function.

“Max… Not to belabor the point, but I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.”

“Well, apparently he saw your poem in _The New Yorker_ and now he won’t stop calling me, talking all sorts of nonsense about wrinkles in time and how it’s apparently a matter of life and death that you two meet.”

“Stalker?”

“Perhaps? He sounded very polite. A bit hot, even. You know, if I swung that way.”

“Creeper?”

“He’s interested in _you_ , so I’d say - most definitely.”

“How’d he find your information?”

“It’s not a bloody secret I represent you, is it?” Through the phone, John can hear the distinct sound of the clinking of an ice cube against a glass. Hypocrite! “He probably just Googled me!”

“What’s it got to do with me?”

“It’s your poem that’s got his knickers all in a bunch.”

“The poem I told you not to publish?” John presses on the bridge of his nose harder. He’s definitely going to have a headache the rest of the day.

“Got to keep your name in the print _somehow_ , mon cher.”

“What’d he say about wrinkles in time?” John asks, sitting up in bed, his blood pounding against his temples.

“Why don’t I just give you his number, yes?”

***

It’s crazy. James doesn’t need Google to tell him it’s crazy. How is he even supposed to explain to this “John Silver” person, if that even is his real name, that he’s somehow written down the words from his dream? How is he going to suggest that they might be part of the same soul group without sounding like the biggest mixture of a stalker/groupie/asshat that’s ever existed? And what do you even say in that situation? “You plagiarized my dreams, young man!” Ha! (If, that is, Silver is a man in the first place – it wouldn’t be the first time a woman used a male pseudonym for publication.)

As it turns out, apparently Silver is at least as mad as James is, whatever percentage mad it might be, because he agrees to meet him for coffee at the Blue Bottle, and all James has to say is “I liked your poem.”

***

It’s the sound of his voice, Professor James Flint. Got his Ph.D. from MIT, currently listed as faculty of theoretical physics at NYU. John can Google too. There was a grainy, black and white photo on his lab’s website, that John figured had to be at least ten years old. You’d think NYU would get with the times and use a colored photo because John suddenly needs to know what color Flint’s hair is and whether his nose is peppered with freckles.

“I liked your poem,” the disembodied voice said.

“Do you want to meet and talk about it?”

John literally cannot believe himself. What empirical data does he have that he is actually for real?

“I’d love that.”

Jesus Christ. John can feel his pants tightening as he sits there. His hand clutches helplessly over the growing bulge behind his zipper. Down, boy!

“I’d love that too,” he hears himself say, then he throws the phone away in disgust. Luckily, it lands in the soft cushions of John’s couch. He lunges his body after it and retrieves it in time to hear James suggest they meet at the latest Blue Bottle that recently popped up in Manhattan.

John needs to get a fucking grip, is what.

***

His eyes are a ridiculous shade of topaz blue. His lips are bitten red out of habit, James notices as John’s teeth once again sink into the fleshy meat of his lower lip. His dark curls cascade like something out of a god damn Botticelli painting, simultaneously silken and wild, around his face. His face, which is suspiciously heart-shaped, as if daring anyone to look upon him and remain indifferent.

Well, James is far from indifferent.

Sitting there, in front of John Silver (who, incidentally, is most definitely a man, not that James was checking out his junk, mind you… well, maybe a bit), he finds it very difficult for the first time in his life to explain why exactly he studies quantum physics.

“I guess I’ve always had this nagging sensation like I’ve left something important somewhere very far away, some place where I could not just reach into again, but now…” James finds himself stuttering over words that used to make sense at some point.

“Now?” John echoes. “You are wondering whether you’ve been looking in the wrong place all along?”

And suddenly James feels himself smiling. “Tell me about your books,” he says, and John blushes a very becoming shade of pink, up to the very lobes of his ears (which, incidentally, are also adorable).

“I’m afraid my novels aren’t particularly erudite, Professor.”

“I have some distinctly philistine proclivities,” James confesses in a semi-whisper and he can swear that John shifts closer to him and laughs softly under his breath. “Please, tell me about them.”

“Well… It’s about these pirates,” John whispers conspiratorially.

***

By the next time they meet (because of course John had scheduled a second date before the first one even ended), James has already read both of John’s published novels. John has to remind himself that their first meeting was never technically a date, but what else is he supposed to think when James leans closer and tells him about the curves in the space-time continuum where time folds in on itself and it is theoretically possible for two distinct worlds to coexists simultaneously? Somehow, it’s the most romantic thing John has ever discussed.

Or it might be that James’ hair glows like burnished bronze in the October sun. Or that John wants to know what the skin of his neck feels like against his own lips. Or that he can’t seem to take his eyes off of James’ hands while he chops up the onions in the kitchen for the pasta sauce he’s throwing together impromptu even though John did not arrive early and had been expected.

“I’m sorry,” James is smiling one of his disarming smiles, “I thought I’d be ready to feed you but I got completely caught up in your writing and lost track of time.”

“Flatterer,” John teases, coming around the kitchen counter and pressing against James’ back. His broad shoulders, the narrowing of his waist, the firm globes of his ass as John presses forward against him. James feels so solid, so much more real than anyone John has ever touched before.

“Is it working?” James turns his face and John catches his lips with his own mouth, while his hand gently takes the knife from James’ hand and sets it aside. “What about dinner?” James asks, his eyes wide, his pupils huge, obsidian circles of desire, floating in a sea of green.

“Dinner can wait.” John runs his fingers through James’ hair and thinks he’s been waiting to do that for far longer than he is even cognizant of. “I cannot.”

John has had a decent number of lovers before. Nothing to write home about, but perhaps that’s to be expected: when you spend so much time inside your own head, reality is certain to disappoint. But John has no idea how to handle the situation he’s found himself in with James Flint, professor of quantum physics.

When their mouths collide, John feels like he’s dying and being reborn. Perhaps this is what James means about two different worlds existing simultaneously. He’s Schrödinger’s cat, both dead and alive, and burning, burning from the inside. Everywhere James’ hands land upon his skin turns into a furnace. Desire churns in his bones, and even his marrow begins to melt.

“John, I…”

“Me too,” he says.

They collide in a heap of writhing limbs, thrusting and rutting against each other like two powerful streams rushing into the delta, needing only to merge before they become the sea. What sweet waters hide in the corners of James’ generous, lush mouth? What mystical nectar runs through his veins? John wants to feel and to taste. He wants to take all of James into his mouth at the same time.

There must have been a point in time, a moment when John could have said ‘yes.’

“Yes!” he moans against James’ lips. “Yes!” he repeats as he wraps his mouth around James’ cock. “Yes!” as James slides inside him, hard and trembling.

 _You were born out of the ether of my dreams_ , John thinks. But this, this isn’t a dream. This must be what the Buddhists call _bodhi_ , the awakening. And if it is a dream, then we are dreaming it together, he thinks, and he wraps his legs tightly around James, pulling him yet deeper inside himself. Deeper still, until he knows that there’s no escape, because this time he will never let go.

***

“Did you finish it?” James stirs from his sleep as John’s body descends onto the mattress they share and John’s arms wrap around him under the comforter.

“I did,” John whispers into the nape of James’ neck, pressing the words into his skin and sealing them with a kiss.

“Are you going to tell me how it ends?” James wonders, his thumb absentmindedly stroking over John’s hand where their fingers have entwined.

“Spoilers,” John chuckles and presses another kiss to a freckle-speckled shoulder, the skin there so warm, the feel and flavor of James’ flesh so familiar against his mouth.

“Oh, come on, love,” James wiggles in John’s embrace, pressing back into his lover’s arms in a way that makes John lose all reason very quickly. “Just a little spoiler?” John’s teeth graze tenderly against the ligaments of James’ shoulder. “Do they destroy each other?”

The Captain and the Quartermaster. What was his endgame?

James feels John smiling into the nape of his neck, body lax and warm, and half drifting off to sleep even as his lips press soft kisses into James’ skin.

“They save each other,” John replies before drifting off into a realm that no longer seems so ominous as it once did, because he’s found his port. He’s finally come home.


End file.
